Sadiq Khan floats idea of London getting its own special Brexit deal

In a speech to the Institute of Directors today Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, will float the idea of London getting a special Brexit deal. Stressing the importance of London businesses being able to continue to recruit skilled workers from abroad, he will say that he is urging the government to ensure that firms can continue to hire these workers after Brexit. But, if the government does not adopt a UK-wide solution to this problem, he will call for London to get a bespoke Brexit deal.

He will tell the summit:

London’s businesses must retain access to the skilled workforce they need in order to grow – it’s absolutely essential to protecting jobs, growth and tax revenues across Britain over the next decade.

I will keep pushing the government to recognise this vital need in their negotiating position – but it doesn’t look like they are listening.

If the government ignores the needs of business and pushes ahead with a new system that cuts off access to skilled workers then we will have no choice but to look at a London-specific solution ...

The City of London Corporation and London Chambers of Commerce have already done some crucial early thinking about options – but we need to go further and faster to make the case to the government and develop a new system.

Boris Johnson has sparked a fresh Cabinet row by calling for a Brexit amnesty for tens of thousands of illegal immigrants.

During a No10 meeting chaired by Theresa May, the Foreign Secretary renewed his controversial former policy when he was London Mayor to give residency rights to any illegals who have escaped detection for 10 years ...

One senior minister there told The Sun: “It’s an insane idea and would make ordinary Brits furious.

“A lot of us round the table couldn’t believe Boris is still going on about this.

“Privately, Boris is still the most pro-immigration member of the Cabinet.”

But The Sun has also been told Home Secretary Amber Rudd was not one of Boris’s critics, and instead asked him for details of his thinking after the session broke up.

The party’s education spokesman Tulip Siddiq has been secretly recorded admitting Labour still ‘hasn’t made a decision’ on whether to block Article 50, which begins the process of leaving the EU.

She said she was ‘minded to vote against it’ – and revealed the issue was being widely discussed by her fellow MPs ...

Ms Siddiq said: ‘There’s two options. One is we vote against Article 50 and the Labour Party I should say hasn’t actually made a decision on what’s going to happen.

‘This is what’s floating around the tearooms every night. Some of us will vote against Article 50, but not everyone, then it will still get through. The second option is that a lot of us vote against it, it doesn’t go through, the next step will be a General Election. I’ll be honest and say I have been minded to vote against it.’

The worst-kept secret in fashion is out: Samantha Cameron, wife of the former prime minister, is launching her own fashion label.

It will be called Cefinn, and the first 40 pieces will be on sale soon at Selfridges and Net-a-Porter. Mrs Cameron is seeking to cast off her image as political spouse and heiress in much the same way as Victoria Beckham reinvented herself as a fashion designer after life as a Spice Girl.

Police investigating child sex abuse should have a licence to practise similar to the system for firearms officers, Amber Rudd, the home secretary, told the College of Policing this morning. She said:

It is important that only those who are absolutely qualified to perform critical roles dealing with the vulnerable are deployed to those situations.

And that is why the Home Office and the College of Policing have been working closely together to develop a licence to practise.

It will ensure that the public receive an assurance of competence and a delivery of consistent standards. It will also mean that police officers are not forced to take on roles that they are not prepared for or professionally trained to do.

If your child was sick you wouldn’t expect them to see a doctor with no experience in children’s medicine, and it’s right to apply the same logic here.

The College of Policing will be given £1.9m to fund a pilot scheme testing the proposed licensing system.

Gordon Brown says oppression of children globally now the great civil rights issue of our time

Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, is speaking today at a summit in Brussels on education in emergencies. Brown is the UN’s special envoy for global education and, in a powerful speech, he will say that the International Criminal Court should prioritise investigating crimes against children.

Here are the key points.

Brown will urge the International Criminal Court to take crimes against children much more seriously.

This is no world for a child. Now that the International Criminal Court has, to its credit, been persuaded to announce just this month that it will take seriously and give priority to crimes against children as war crimes and crimes against humanity, 2017 must be the year when we end impunity for the systematic violation of children’s rights.

I can think of nearly 10 countries – from Syria, Iraq and Libya to South Sudan, Nigeria and Afghanistan – where atrocity crimes have been committed against children that have so far gone unpunished.

I believe evidence is now mounting of a war crime perpetrated by Russian-Syrian operations when a school in Idlib was bombed and 30 pupils and teachers were killed on October 26th.

New video imagery offers us additional verification that damage to the school complex in the village of Haas was caused by airstrikes.

We must call them to account – and ask them to explain a Human Rights Watch report based on interviews and photographs that places Russian and Syrian bombers above the site on the day.

As Tony Lake of UNICEF said, if this is deliberate, a war crime has been committed. It cannot go unpunished and its perpetrators cannot escape with impunity. The very inquiry the Russians offered should now be put not only to the UN general assembly but also to the security council – to enable independent investigators to be appointed and a case brought before the ICC.

He will suggest that protecting the rights of children is now the great civil rights challenge of our time.

In the 1960s the world fought for black civil rights; in the 1970s and 1980s over apartheid; and in the 1990s and beyond over the rights of the disabled, women and LGBT persons.

Now it is time to put centre stage the civil rights struggle for children – for an end to the casual and routine violation of children’s rights; for the right of boys and girls not to be in the front line of war; for schools not be used as instruments of war; for children’s rights to education to be upheld at all times, irrespective of borders, and for us to end exploitation in child labour, child marriage and child trafficking, in favour of education.

He will say that 2016 has been the most dangerous year for children globally since the second world war.

With 500,000 children under siege in Syria and Iraq, an International Criminal Court investigation into the abuse of children in Libya, evidence mounting of a war crime committed in October against schoolchildren in Idlib, Syria and a total of 30million children displaced, 2016 will go down as the year in post-war history when it has never been more unsafe to be a child.

No child in Syria’s conflict zones is safe, not even in hospitals or the recently-opened underground classrooms. The evidence grows of war crimes against girls trafficked out of Libya. In Nigeria, millions of girls live in fear of Boko Haram and will not go to school. With child marriage, child trafficking and child labour on the rise – and with thousands of girls having vanished on the routes from the Middle East to Europe – it can now be more dangerous to be a girl or a boy out on the streets than a soldier in the trenches.

He will urge the UN and other international organisations to back a “new deal for the world’s children” for 2017.

I propose a New Deal for the world’s children for 2017.

The United Nations, the World Bank and all other international institutions should sign up to a new determination in which:

a) All schools are protected as safe places.

b) Children are not used as weapons of war and in particular not as child militia.

c) Every refugee child’s right to education is upheld.

d) Every war crime and crime against humanity committed against children should be fully investigated.

The new deal for children must answer why for the most vulnerable we do the least and why instead of guaranteed help all we do is pass the begging bowl around at times of crisis.

He will say that, as part of this “new deal”, international organisations should ensure that displaced and refugee children receive education, not just food and shelter.

Support for independence in Scotland falls below 45% for first time since referendum, poll suggests

The poll puts support for independence at 44%, and support for Scotland staying in the UK at 56%. The paper’s report goes on:

John Curtice, Scotland’s leading polling expert, said the Times data was the first poll to suggest that the “yes” vote has fallen below the level of September 18, 2014.

He said it showed that the SNP’s strategy of linking independence so closely to EU membership had eroded support for the core policy.

The decline in support for independence coincides with an upsurge in the popularity of Ruth Davidson and the Scottish Conservatives, who have made being the party of the Union their core message to voters.

Ms Davidson’s personal net approval is now at 25 points, up from 21 in the last Times poll three months ago. Her overall net positive rating is more than double Ms Sturgeon’s 11 points.

That this House recognises that the Chilcot Inquiry provided substantial evidence of misleading information being presented by the then Prime Minister and others on the development of the then Government’s policy towards the invasion of Iraq as shown most clearly in the contrast between private correspondence to the United States government and public statements to Parliament and to the people and also in the presentation of intelligence information; and calls on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, further to its current investigation into the lessons to be learned from the Chilcot Inquiry for the machinery of government, to conduct a further specific examination of this contrast in public and private policy and of the presentation of intelligence, and then to report to the House on what further action it considers necessary and appropriate to help prevent any repetition of this disastrous series of events.

At a time when Blair is planning his political comeback, it is high time that this parliament and its committees at long last brought this dark stain on UK foreign policy to a close by investigating how such grave misleading occurred and taking the appropriate action to avoid it happening again.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Damian Green, the work and pensions secretary, gives evidence to the Commons work and pensions committee.

I will be focusing in particular on PMQs, on the opening of the Blair debate and on Chote’s evidence to the Treasury committee. But, as usual, I will also be covering the breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web.

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